Interview: Deborah Brown’s life in dance

Rachel Storey and Nicola Harvey

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Posted: Tuesday, 8 April 2014 at 10:19am

‘Captivating’, ‘magnificent’, ‘outstanding’, ‘a remarkable dancer’ – these are just a few of the adjectives reviewers have used in recent years to describe senior Bangarra dancer Deborah Brown. She is one of the country’s finest contemporary dancers, but after ten years with Australia’s top Indigenous performing arts company, Brown is retiring. She’s determined to bow out on a high, without injury and without losing her passion for the art form that has taken her from suburban Brisbane to main stages around the world. It was in Europe where Deborah performed her final role for Bangarra at the Holland Dance Festival in February.

Now one month into retirement, Deborah has had time to reflect on a remarkable career but also the importance of dance for contemporary Indigenous culture.

When Brown auditioned for Bangarra in 2003 – on a whim, because she thought her artistic future lay in acting – she remembers “that a new switch went on”. Having trained in ballet since the age of five, Brown responded instantly to Stephen Page’s choreography.

“It was a style of dance that I hadn’t learned before but my body really adjusted to it, or loved it,” she says. “With Bangarra you’re telling a greater story, greater than any of the trivial things you may be going through.”

In 2010 Brown was nominated in the ‘Best Female Dancer in a Dance or Physical Theatre Production’ category at the Helpmann Awards for her performance in Fire - A Retrospective. In 2013 she won the Helpmann Award in the same category for her performance in Terrain. But Brown doesn’t perform solely for such accolades; dance for her is a language that when communicated with integrity keeps the knowledge and stories of Indigenous culture alive.

“We were taught at Bangarra that there’s purity behind the choreography,” she says. “Because we’re putting on what could appear as a very commercial sort of platform, because we’re going on a stage, people are buying tickets, we’ve got sponsors and we are a major performing arts company, it was always about not getting lost in that world. And always at the core of it is [the question] ‘where is the story coming from?’, ‘what is the story about?’ and ‘who are we indebted to in terms of where that story has come from’.”

“I think that’s really valuable to take even outside of an Indigenous or cultural company, I think it’s something that any performing artist needs to recognise and should recognise. To learn about the truth of what they’re bringing forward.”

Last year, Brown was one of the senior dancers invited to choreograph a piece for Bangarra’s Dance Clan 3. Drawing on her Torres Strait Islander heritage, Brown chose to explore the history of pearl diving and the risks divers would take in the early 20th century in order to make a living. Brown is a self described film buff, so in her choreographic debut she communicated her haunting dance piece via film making her directorial debut at the same time. It was a significant milestone for the dancer, who is slowly starting to see herself as an artist producing across multiple art forms.

Stephen Page, Bangarra’s artistic director, says Deborah has transformed into a rare and unique artist. “There's a distinctive beauty in her artistic expression that allowed her to emerge as a leading Bangarra dancer,” he says.

“Deborah connected to the spirit of our stories and shared them with audiences across Australia and around the world. She became an inspiration and a muse to myself and our choreographers, she will live on in the spirit of Bangarra's songline.”

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bangarra presents Patyegarang, the journey of a potent Indigenous spirit alive in Australia’s past and present, at venues around the country from 13 June – 6 September, 2014. Bangarra.com.au

- Produced by Rachel Storey and Nicola Harvey

Dive by Deborah Brown (excerpt)

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